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By David L. UlinLos Angeles Times • Saturday January 5, 2013 8:53 AM

On July 4, at the CERN laboratory in Geneva — home of the massive particle accelerator known as
the Large Hadron Collider — two groups of physicists announced the discovery of an elementary
particle, the Higgs boson. Widely known as “the God particle,” the Higgs is important, on the most
basic level, for giving other subatomic particles mass.

“The Higgs particle arises from a field pervading space, known as the Higgs field,” explains
Sean Carroll in
The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge
of a New World. “Everything in the known universe, as it travels through space, moves through
the Higgs field; it’s always there lurking invisibly in the background.”

As to why this matters, the California Institute of Technology physicist points out that “
Without the Higgs, electrons and quarks would be massless, just like photons, the particles of
light. They would move at the speed of light themselves, and it would be impossible to form atoms
and molecules, much less life as we know it.” “Without it,” he adds, “the world would be an utterly
different place.”

The Particle at the End of the Universe is a scientific detective story, the saga of the
search for the Higgs. It is driven by a fundamental, yet elusive, mystery: What is the nature of
the universe? That, Carroll thinks, is both a matter of philosophy and curiosity, going back to
Aristotle on the one hand and, on the other, to our ongoing fascination with how reality works.

“Passion for science,” he writes late in the book, “derives from an aesthetic sensibility, not a
practical one. We discover something new about the world, and that lets us better appreciate its
beauty.”

This is a key idea because it suggests a way of thinking about theoretical physics — even for
the non-scientifically minded — as the search for “an elegant mechanism . . . like being able to
read poetry in the original language, instead of being stuck with mediocre translation.”

Carroll gives a lot of context: facts and figures, yes, but also passion, characters and
history. He introduces physicists such as Peter Higgs, from whom the Higgs boson gets its name, as
well as others who did groundbreaking work in the early 1960s positing the existence of such a
particle.

At the same time, Carroll grounds his book in the personal, using his childhood interest in
dinosaurs to frame what he calls “the quest for awesome — that literal awe that you feel when you
understand something profound for the first time.”

For Carroll, the point is to open subatomic physics to an audience that might be daunted
otherwise.

Yet Carroll’s status as a physicist gives
The Particle at the End of the Universe its necessary heft.